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November 30, 2008

The reading glasses were lost, then found, then broken. When I return to Santa Fe I'll pick up the new ones and then, pfffft. I'll be back reading at top speed again, without an e-Reader (hint hint, Santa). My reads have stacked up.

Mother visited over Thanksgiving and told me she loved Edgar Sawtelle. Before I think of reading that, I have Three Cups of Tea that I have to read for a book club (the author visited Santa Fe to a sold-out audience in November) and besides, I want to pass that on as a White Elephant at our family Christmas exchange. When I pick up my new reading glasses this week, that's what I'm going to read, and then this is my list of nexts:

Other books on my next to-read list:

The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman

Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction this month for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family so maybe that or Other National Book Award Winners

I'm sorting out books from storage, remembering what I loved, what has shaped me as I place these relics on newly built book shelves. My favorite that I've reclaimed for the first re-read: Warren Chappell's A Short History of the Printed Word. It makes me think about the history of our times: the digital word.Here I give you the last paragraphs from A History of the Printed Word:

When Europeans first arrived in North America, some 500 languages were spoken between the Arctic Ocean and the Isthmus of Panama. Each one had a thriving oral literature, but very few... had a script of any kind. Practical alphabets have been devised in recent years for hundreds of Native American languages and much work has been done in establishing typographic forms appropriate to Native American oral literatures (which is a language neither verser nor prose)...it is another state of literary language, still ignored by many linguists and literary critics...there is good reason to believe it is an older literary medium than either verse or prose. It is pre-typographic language, only now developing a typographic form...

So part of my reading involves the reading of signs and symbols, one of my latest endeavors as I study the folk art of this area in New Mexico.

November 29, 2008

My son and I sat in front of The Rabbit Hunter by Oscar Berninghaus at the New Mexico Museum of Art. For an hour we reconstructed the painting, with a little (non) help here and there from the security guard who ambled in and wanted to add his two cents.

This was for an academic paper but the experience of interpreting an artist's message of culture and a mother/son afternoon together was an experience. In many ways. Because it really is all about narrative. Who is saying what about what. That is how you read culture. This is the white man, noted artist, reading and interpreting the culture of native americans. But is it reality? Of course not. Although the chamisa in bloom, in full yellow in front, is a very accurate depiction, and the landscape in the back is recognizable, Indians venturing out on hunting parties?

Berninghaus romanticized the life of the local Indians (he was living in Taos at the time, in northern New Mexico where the Taos Indians had been living longer than any anglo community in the United States) and while he painted this painting, the scientists under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer were developing the Atomic bomb at Los Alamos, just south down the Rio Grande River (known south of the border as the Rio Bravo). Joseph Traugott, curator of 20th century art at the museum, had reconstructed the main gallery, written a book about it, and this piece was one of our favorites.

So, who is hunting whom? The Indians hunting the white man/other indians/animals/ or the Los Alamos guys on a rampage to hunt down and kill, via remote bombery, the Japanese on the other side of the world. You get it, right? Cowboys and Indians. Out West.

Traugott's book, How The West Was One, is an accompaniment to the exhibit and is a great book, by the way -- I've read it cover -to-cover, and some of my friends and I enjoyed a private tour with Traugott of his exhibit.

I could have used my art scholarship to major in art, but, alas, I didn't. I majored in journalism which will become known in this century as the ancient art of reporting news. My area of specialization: public relations, which means the art of framing the narrative, simply put. Still, the afternoon was enjoyable for me -- just to spend to time w/ my son. But the romantic idea of the Indian... that is another story.

In November 1972 the Dow went above 1,000 for the first time. I was a sophomore in high school in Oklahoma City, cheerleading on Friday nights and learning how to drive. A snap shot of a day would be doing French homework, discovering a talent in art class and still feeling sleepy in chapel which was an every school day thing at 8:00 am, and ending my school day with field hockey. I would come home to my mother in the kitchen, feeding my baby brother while she prepared dinner.

I have a scrapbook of those days, somewhere in storage, mostly in square photos and scrapbooks from the rest of my life ending abruptly in 2004 when I went digital, which was about the same time Kodak was removed from the Dow Jones. Now Polaroid will quit making film. Snap. Change happens like that.

My retro daughter who still plays with a Polaroid should stock up with film.

November 24, 2008

This??? I am on record for hating Barbies but Barbie Boobs objectified? Homage to the perfect boobs? Wear the Barbie body on your body. Nothing like the perfect boob necklace. A new iteration of the perfect body: Barbie jewelry. Jewelry designer Margaux Lange found a new way to keep Barbie in our lives, with her clever accessories made of various Barbie body parts. This remix makes sense, as it is adult women who would wear this and interact with the jewelry, not little girls growing up.

Children's Toys That Changed the World should include Barbie as well as Lego, G.I. Joe, Fisher-Price Play Family Village and Nerf, but I didn't see Barbie on the list. Barbie made women think there was an idea body for grown up women (and their body wasn't it).

Studies have already shown that media images of female models have a negative impact on how women view their own bodies, but it is interesting that images of female idealization have a similar impact on men. Magazines that are dominated by sexual images of women impact men's feelings about their own bodies; men who viewed the layouts of objectified females reported more body self-consciousness.

One of my book clubs is reading about Gertrude Bell and I remember from earlier studies that she, when in Iraq, felt that wearing a burka was freeing (as compared to the Victorian dress of her peers). She was under the fashion construct of tiny waists, bound tight by corsets (and still exemplified by the tiny-waisted Barbie years later).

update: An article in an anthropology magazine, Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects (pdf) (via NeuroAnthropology) delves into this issue, which I found interesting in light of the fact that millions of U.S. women undergo plastic surgery to have enhanced breasts. The cultural underpinnings of the boobs of Barbie...

November 22, 2008

The mail box can't hold it all. I'm tired of these 15 years or so of my mail weighing more than a new born baby, junk junk junk. The 19 billion catalogues mailed to Americans every year consume 53 million trees and who knows how many tons of paper. I hate it.

With a four month sack full of junk mail, I sat and registered more on Green Dimes, sent off signed notes to data base managers (Green Dimes provided the verbage) and have respectfully said ENOUGH.

Have a child get married and gifts delivered and wham, you are getting every catalogue imaginable.

I'm tired of supporting the U.S. Postal Service by passively accepting junk mail and wasting time with junk I don't care to see. With the help of Green Dimes, I'm saying no. Enough. No more.

November 18, 2008

4 YEARS OF AGE - My Mommy can do anything!8 YEARS OF AGE - My Mom knows a lot! A whole lot!12 YEARS OF AGE - My Mother doesn't really know quite everything.14 YEARS OF AGE - Naturally, Mother doesn't know that, either.16 YEARS OF AGE - Mother? She's hopelessly old-fashioned.18 YEARS OF AGE - That old woman? She's way out of date!25 YEARS OF AGE - Well, she might know a little bit about it! 35 YEARS OF AGE - Before we decide, let's get Mom's opinion.45 YEARS OF AGE - Wonder what Mom would have thought about it?65 YEARS OF AGE - Wish I could talk it over with Mom.

THE STAGES OF MOTHERHOOD ARE THE NAMES YOU ARE CALLED:

mommy, mom, mother.

What does that mean when I'm still......mom?

P.S. update: Now there are Motrin Moms, quite a powerful bunch with new media.

November 17, 2008

Media is changing from mass to (a flood of) niche information and political communications in this new environment this year made rapid radical leaps. Here are things to highlight:

Media & Political Communication Theories: I dug into two very relevant academic research studies on the latest ideas that are applicable to our times - 1) The Changing Foundations of Political Communication pdfby W. Lance Bennett & Shanto Iyengar, Journal of Communication, Forthcoming; and 2) Red Media, Blue Media pdf by Shanto Iyengar, Stanford, and Kyu S. Hahn of Yonsei University and UCLA, published in the Journal of Communications on the proliferation of new media and how enhanced media choices will contribute to the further polarization of the news audience.

News Will Not Get More Fair and Balanced: The Fairness Doctrine
was repealed by Ronald Reagan in 1987. Before that time the media
outlets were limited and requiring equal time for political
opinions/news made sense. Now there are many outlets and
opinion/biased news so The Fairness Doctrine doesn't make sense (if you
want more on that, go read the pdf academic research paper on Red Media
Blue Media in the paragraph above). We are now at The End of Objectivity and journalism is more opinionated and it is hard to tell pundits from journalists. It is even hard to tell the truth, really (think of the fake story about Sarah Palin not knowing that Africa was a continent) in these fast and continuous news cycles. Yes, the press is biased
- in favor of recognizing who is winning and stating that perhaps too
often but Editor and Publisher asks, too, "Is it “bias” to ... vet a
candidate for vice president who (we now know) had not been vetted by
anyone else?"

Well, Red Media has been behind online and strong in radio talk shows. Young Republicans have a new site to recover from being bamboozled with new media: Rebuild The Party.

Obama's reading habits: After three months of campaigning, he stopped reading blogs. After six months, he stopped watching cable news shows. After nine months, he stopped reading the press clips, relying instead on his staff to flag important stories. This, for the most tech savvy president we've had.

New White House Communications: Will media mediate the message, or will Obama have direct access and skip the mainstream media with the White House communications operation using an email database of more than 10 million supporters. Just as John F. Kennedy mastered television as a medium for taking his message to the public, Obama is poised to transform the art of political communication once again, says Joe Trippi. Obama's first YouTube address was boring. Trend indicator:For the first time everit will be a website -- not a news agency, a magazine or a newspaper --
which will have the largest team of writers covering the White House.
Politico.com, a political news start-up which has soared in popularity
since its launch 22 months ago, will have six full-time reporters to
cover the Obama administration. The Washington Post's doubled crew of
White House reporters will include a full-time blogger. The Right Wing Media is bracing for a shut-out.

TV may be yesterday, anyway, with these trends: When Tina Fey debuted her impression of Sarah Palin on "Saturday Night Live" last month, more people watched the comedy sketch online at NBC.com or Hulu.com than during the show's broadcast. Last week, YouTube announced that it would start carrying old TV shows and movies from the film studio. Yet again part of the post-media world?

November 16, 2008

Aristotle taught us that spoken words are our symbols of mental experience and words are the symbols of spoken words. We became textually fluent and entered a time of revolution after moveable type made text widely available. But now, we're entering a post-literate time and digital literacy is replacing textual literacy. I'm perplexed, trying to understand this, especially as a bibliophile spending hours this fall unpacking and sorting beloved books from storage.

Most adults didn't read one book last year. Americans watch almost six movies a month on DVD. Those ages 18 -24 watch 88 DVDs each year. The average person saw 6.0 movies in the theater in 2007. And this: Even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

Our words and language are becoming abbreviated, mere blips and talking points and tag lines, ideas packaged by politicians and pundits and sold like products. We've seen the botched puffery of Palin's words and Bushisms that contorted our language (Palin “joined this team that is a team of mavericks” and the W. Bush classic, “Is our children learning?”). But in the world of Twitter and little lines of friendship via IM and facebook, we're changing.

George Orwell wrote on the Politics of Language but that was in a different time, at the rise of mass communication that made packaged word terms possible and constructed messages for mass audiences powerful.

Brands and icons are non-textual short cuts to literate understanding. So, just compare the symbols at top left, still used in New Mexico, still active as a language in an area where oral language has never given way to text.*

Look at the logos, at right, that are recognizable today without words and hold meaning as stand-alone signs. Meaning and ideas are moving away from text and I would contend also away from face-to-face transmission. Terry Heaton writes that we're in a post-media world. Maybe for now. I think we're headed for a post-literate world.

November 15, 2008

Today you can pull in President Elect Barack Obama's chat via YouTube (think Fireside Chat). Recorded as the weekly Democrat radio address yesterday, once it airs today on radio, it will be available on Obama's transition site, change.gov. He's coming straight to you. Whenever you want to pay attention to him and pull in his message.

Are you empowered to get his communications directly?

"The Obama team has written the playbook on how to use YouTube for political campaigns. Not only have they achieved impressive mass -- uploading over 1800 videos that have been viewed over 110 million times total -- but they've also used video to cultivate a sense of community amongst supporters," said Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube.

This is perfect communications for our post-literate society, the leader going straight to you. The graphic, left, used for Rock the Vote, hearkens to creation stories of the Hopi, Zuni and other Native Americans whose myths speak of emergence from an inner world. I've written about the Obama logo and how the symbol, like the Nike brand, needs no words. The symbols are as much a part of the message as text, if not more. But there is something more. Obama is redefining the sense of belonging to a community, or at least he has tapped into the bowling alone isolation of our culture.

Getting unfiltered communications, even if only one-way, upsets our media system of spokespeople and pundits. Obama went straight to Facebook, straight to Twitter, straight to people who want to belong, want to be part of something, want to interact directly as part of a community. Lonlieness isn't healthy and facebook friends are not deep affiliations. Bowling alone is lonely, you know. The Secret Service calls Obama Renegade (his wife is Renaissance, and their daughters Rosebud and Radiance). W. Bush was called Trailblazer.

How we get our information in order to be informed citizens so we can uphold our democracy will be interesting. Obama is on the cutting edge, coming directly to you. But it is more than that. There is a cultural and sociological need to be part of something beyond oneself. Obama is an avenue of connection.